CAGED BY LOVE

Some wounds never bleed. They sit under the skin, stitched together by the fragile hands of hope.

Nora knew that kind of wound too well.

She sat at the edge of her bed, pulling the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her hands, the fabric worn thin from too many nights like this. The apartment smelled faintly of burnt coffee and the lavender candle she'd forgotten to blow out hours ago. Another fight. Or maybe it wasn’t even a fight — just another quiet collapse.

It was strange, she thought, how sadness could build a home inside you so quietly you almost mistook it for your own breathing.

He wasn’t cruel. That was the worst part. He wasn’t the villain in a story that would be easy to leave behind. He was tired. Distant. Half-there and half-lost in his own disillusionment. And somewhere along the way, Nora had learned to make herself small enough to fit into the spaces he allowed.

She remembered a time when his hands felt like promises. Now, they barely touched her. Words between them had become practical, transactional. Did you pick up the dry cleaning? We’re out of milk. I’m working late tonight.

No I missed you.

No How was your day?

No Tell me about the dream you had last night.

And yet, she stayed. She told herself she was waiting for the man he used to be to come back, like he had just misplaced himself somewhere in the daily grind. She stitched up the empty spaces with excuses: He’s stressed. I’m being needy. Relationships are hard.

Sometimes, late at night, she would trace the invisible scars across her heart like a map. This one from the time he forgot her birthday. That one from when he didn’t notice the tears she thought she’d hidden so well. Tiny cuts that never seemed big enough to leave — but stacked together, they felt like a thousand-pound weight on her chest.

Bandaged but not healed. That was how she moved through the world now.

Friends asked how she was, and she smiled — that special kind of smile you learn when you don’t want to burden anyone with the truth. We’re fine, she would say, because the alternative — explaining the hollow, the ache, the quiet unraveling — felt too big to hold in a five-minute conversation.

The thing about sadness, Nora realized, is that it doesn’t always come with shouting or slammed doors. Sometimes, it comes dressed in silence, wearing the face of the person you once loved more than anything.

She remembered the girl she used to be — the one who laughed loudly, who dreamed recklessly, who believed that love could fix everything if you just tried hard enough. That girl felt like a ghost now, someone she might pass on the street and not recognize.

One night, after he had gone to bed without saying goodnight — again — Nora sat in the dim light of the kitchen and wrote a letter. Not to him. To herself.

It wasn’t a grand manifesto. Just a quiet reminder.

*You are not too much.

You are not too sensitive.

You are not asking for something impossible.

You deserve to be seen, to be chosen, even on the hard days.*

She didn’t leave him that night. Some stories aren’t wrapped up in neat endings. Some sadness need time to loosen their grip, thread by painful thread.

But something shifted.

Maybe it was the first stitch she pulled loose from the bindings she had wrapped around her own heart.

Maybe healing doesn’t come in grand gestures but in tiny acts of rebellion — like believing your feelings are real, like letting yourself want more.

Maybe the first glow of change isn’t visible to the outside world. Maybe it’s just a whisper inside you, a small voice saying, Not this. Not forever.

Nora folded the letter and tucked it into her journal. She stood up, stretched her arms to the ceiling, and breathed. Really breathed. Deep, filling her lungs for herself, not for survival, but because she still could.

There was no applause. No sweeping music. Just the quiet sound of someone deciding, softly but surely, that sadness would not be her forever home.